


Drowning

by thedevilchicken



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, First Kiss, First Time, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-27
Updated: 2011-05-27
Packaged: 2018-04-05 09:37:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4174965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Loras comes to Storm's End looking for a knighthood. Renly Baratheon is not as expected.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Drowning

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on 27 May 2011 for the 2011 Small Fandom Fest. 
> 
> Uses some book elements, such as Loras joining the Kingsguard and fostering at Storm's End.

It seemed Storm's End lay at the far side of the world when he was sent there in his youth. The journey lasted weeks because the rains came down and turned whole stretches of the Roseroad into marshland as they crossed the Mander; Loras remembers how the mud sucked at his fine leather boots as they stepped soggy into homely inns along the way, or picked out small stone keeps of Tyrell bannermen before they left the Reach. Southern rains were warm, they told him, so he'd best be glad they'd only sent him east and not up north, not to the Wall. He would have liked to see the snow, the Frostfangs and the Haunted Forest, but he was meant for knighthood and not for the Night's Watch. His father's men, veteran soldiers all, laughed and told him he should master squiring first. 

It was raining still around Shipbreaker Bay as they came to the end of their journey. The clouds had followed them, swollen with unending rain though here it was worse, in sight of the sea and not just of the soft-flowing Mander. Loras had swum in the river by his lord father's house more than once, never heeding the maester's warnings because his brothers never did. It didn't matter to him how much older they were, how much stronger in the water, as the young are ever invincible. They said the currents under that mirror-calm surface had taken him down and his big brother Willas had dived in deep to save him. He remembers how it felt to be drowning, though he's never admitted the memory at all; he remembers the chill of the water in his lungs when he couldn't help but breathe it in, and the shadowy figure of Willas as he fished him out, limp as death. He didn't breathe for three whole minutes before he spluttered out the murky water, and he lived again. 

That was a time before Willas was crippled in his very first tourney, before Loras was old enough for armour of his own. He swims now, so much stronger than he was back then because he's made oh so sure of that, but still he remembers how dying felt like nothing at all. Drowning was the worst part. His brother will never swim again. 

Storm's End sat beneath a stormy sky the day that Loras came to it. Robert Baratheon was already king so the lands belonged to his brother. Talk was it should have passed to Stannis, a stern man who Loras once had met at his father's table, but Robert had passed him over, made him Lord of Dragonstone instead. He heard that was a frightful place, starker still than the stones of Storm's End's fortress, a rock out in the Narrow Sea all wreathed in great stone gargoyles. That seemed to him plenty fitting for Stannis. The younger brother inherited in his stead. 

When Robert took the Iron Throne and gave a crown to the stag of his sigil, Renly Baratheon was raised to Lord of Storm's End. On the journey, Loras asked his father's men about the man he was to foster with and they all said he was little more than a boy. He was the youngest of the brothers, too young to rule Storm's End like Loras would have been too young were the gods to give him Highgarden. They could tell him nothing else but Renly's looks were reported to resemble Robert's like a portrait of his youth; Loras imagined their warrior king as he must have been at the Trident, tall and bearded with his big jewelled warhammer there in his hands, a weapon that likely weighed as much as Loras did himself when dressed and armed. He liked the idea of squiring for a man like that. He'd be a knight in no time at all. 

The gates of Storm's End opened and they rode in from the rain. There were masons working on the walls and men said the place would never be the same as it had been before the siege, when Stannis held the castle though all they'd had to eat was rats. Loras wanted to be home with his brothers in the bright green fields and the Highgarden sun, not dripping a puddle of rainwater onto an eastern lord's floor. He never said a word of it; he was there to learn to be the man his father told him he could be, and that man didn't pine for home while standing in a stranger's castle. He wrung the water from his sodden hair, and someone laughed. 

That someone there in Storm's End's great hall was Renly of House Baratheon, and he was nothing at all like Loras had expected. 

They put him to work and he'd been bred much better than to complain of it, not like the other boys. He groomed horses and he polished saddles, he fed the dogs and all because young Renly's castellan told them all it added steel to a young man's character. He sharpened swords and he was good at that; when they sparred in the yard he was good at that too, better than the other boys and better even than Lord Renly. He remembers the confusion that fact had held for him back then, that Renly while well-trained and so clearly very able was not near so adept as his younger squire. When he'd asked Maester Cressen before the old man left for Dragonstone, he just smiled and told him not all men's greatest strength would lie in arms. He thought about that until he truly understood the words, and he's never forgotten. From that moment on, he's seen Renly in a different light. 

Servants drew the water for their young lord's bath, but it was Loras who attended him. Amidst the rich décor of his lordship's chambers, all tapestries and silks and furs that always seemed at odds with everything Baratheon but him, they talked and talked quite often. Renly lounged in the big copper tub as Loras skipped back and forth with a blunt-edged longsword that he'd pilfered one day from the smithy. It weighed too much for his arms back then but he was getting stronger day by day, just as he'd told himself he would. Renly laughed a lot and smiled so very easily, and all his men were really, truly his; that was the talent Renly had that most men didn't, to win hearts and to win loyalty as easy as Loras ever loosed an arrow or swung a sword. Men would follow him. And Loras would too, he knew. 

Renly would stand from the bath when the water took to cooling, and Loras set aside his stolen sword to hand him a cloth to dry with. His lord was tall and slender with the broad, muscled shoulders and deep black hair of his brother, King Robert; one day Loras found he couldn't help but look though the reasons why he simply couldn't fathom. The bathwater ran over Renly's smooth skin and drip-drip-dripped to the tub around his feet. His hips were slim, his limbs long, chest sculpted with the definition of long practice in the yard. His manhood hung there heavy between his long, slender legs as he started to pat himself dry, strong muscles in his shoulders shifting just beneath his skin. Loras almost felt like he was drowning in that moment, as he watched Lord Renly move. Drowning was the only thing he'd ever known quite like it. 

There were girls there at Storm's End, of course. There were noble girls and baseborn girls, girls destined to be ladies of great houses and girls who'd wed the blacksmith or the fletcher's boys. There were girls who'd be fishwives and girls who were whores, girls who cooked and even one who beat out swords in the smithy with great strong hands. The other boys seemed to like those girls, chased after them with their every spare moment, paid for them sometimes and told bawdy tales about the tavern just outside the city walls, the bored innkeeper's wife who'd spread her legs for anyone with a cock between theirs, or the girls at the little whorehouse by the sea where they promised to give you anything your heart desired. 

Loras went with them once or twice, paid for a pretty girl with jet black hair to suck on his cock because that was what they all expected of him. It felt good, he supposed, but it was so hard to feel enthusiasm when he felt not a pang of attraction. That worried him sometimes, as he'd lie awake at night in the room under Renly's, just trying to fathom why he had to be so different from the others. They wanted bare teats and the hot mound that lay between a woman's legs; the idea didn't precisely repulse him but he couldn't find an ounce of fascination hidden there for him. He wasn't quite sure what that meant at all, but he knew somehow it must stay a secret. 

"Is it true they'll give you anything you want?" asked the new boy, one rainy day in the yard. He was a pretty little blonde thing of a Lannister bastard who could barely hold a sword and couldn't fight with one at all. They'd sent him on to Renly for no particularly sound reason, Loras thought, except to be rid of the shame of him back at Casterly Rock. Popular opinion said he belonged to Tywin, the Lannister lord, but his brother Kevan had taken the blame. 

"For a price." The kennelmaster leaned on the fence by the barn and raised his eyebrows at the bastard as the rain came down around the mob of them huddled there. He was a gnarled old thing, scarred but never vicious, a veteran of a dozen battles that he'd tell them all about sometimes. Loras liked to hear the stories. "But you don't look like you've enough coin about you for sampling their treats, M'lord Hill."

The lads chuckled and the bastard huffed; Loras scratched a hound behind the ears and pretended not to listen. 

"They say they'll find you real maidens if you want them and can pay," another squire piped in. 

"Girls of all shapes and sizes, they say. Ones from Lys or the Summer Isles with coloured skin."

"Or dogs, if that's your bent," said Hill. 

The kennelmaster laughed heartily at that and clapped the bastard on the back. The boy had spirit and some small amount of wit if not much skill, Loras would grant him that. 

"I heard some soldiers say there's whole brothels of boys at King's Landing."

"Some men get paid for it too, I hear."

The kennelmaster snorted. "They'll find a fresh corpse for you if you pay ‘em in gold, I'll bet," he said. "I'll stick by the women and leave you lads to adventure if you must."

The big man strode back into the kennels and just like that, they were done. Each wandered back to his duties there about the castle but what they'd said lingered there in Loras's head. He made his way to the armoury, a whetstone and a dozen swords awaiting. He almost saddled a horse and went with the others that night, just to see if what they'd said was true. Something there had piqued his interest and he was sure it wasn't dogs or corpses. 

The servants drew Lord Renly's bath that evening and Loras, ever the faithful page, was there to attend him. The other lads drank and whored out on Shipbreaker Bay, but he pulled out the stolen sword from its place under Renly's big bed and swung it almost casually as they talked over the day. He was getting stronger daily, so he thought; soon he'd be ready for a real sword like his father always promised him, real battle or at least a tourney. Perhaps he'd never be as tall or broad as Renly but he was sure he was almost as strong as him already. 

"So what's the talk in the yard?" Renly asked, as he washed out his hair in the tub. He'd been tucked away in his reception rooms all day since just a little past dawn, with his castellan and his rather grim brother Stannis, a maester and Stannis's Onion Knight. Loras rather liked Ser Davos, though he knew he'd been raised from a smuggler; it reminded him that almost any man could aspire to a knighthood if he so desired, and all it took was courage when the moment came. Were he to judge now by some of the highborn knights he's come to know, he might even say the lower the birth the more courage it takes. 

"They're all out whoring again, my lord," Loras told him, parrying swift against his airy opponent in his always true and perfect form. He could be quicker, though, and stronger, but he'd get there in the end. He practiced more than any of the others, and he'd been better than them all to start. "They say Kym by the shore can find you whatever you're wanting. I think they want to find out."

Renly chuckled. "I've heard it said," he told him. "Some damn fool Pentoshi trader asked her for a horse once, just to see how she'd react. She just asked how many hands and took his coin."

Loras snickered and swung his sword again. Faster, he told himself, faster and he'd be untouchable. He'd once seen the Kingslayer joust out at Harrenhal and knew one day he'd beat him, he swore it to himself just as true as the coin he'd bet with his brothers. 

"Hill says there's brothels of boys in King's Landing," Loras said. Renly ducked under the surface of his bath and came up shaking the water from his ink-black hair like a strangely noble dog, droplets making the candles flicker as Loras watched him. "Do you think Kym has boys?"

"Do you want boys, Loras?"

"What?" He almost dropped his sword and cursed himself inside for that. He stopped, aghast, sword hanging down at his side. "No!"

Renly chuckled again, low and dark. "A man, perhaps."

He shook his head. "My lord, I don't..."

Renly stood then, the cooling water gleaming on his skin like molten gold there in the candlelight and Loras paused to take a breath, to gather himself before he set aside the sword and fetched the cloth for him. He was being teased and he'd overreacted, that was it, it must be that. He met Renly's gaze as he handed him the cloth, just to prove he wasn't craven. He mustn't falter. This was a dangerous game he was playing. He couldn't lose the knighthood he yearned for over this. 

After that night, Loras had fought so much harder than ever. He trained when the others went wenching, tilted at quintains more often than anyone, learned with more weapons than ever required just because the weight of sword and axe and morningstar made him feel like a man grown. He sat a horse as well as any man in the city, so they told him, and he took some pride in that. All he had ever wanted was to be a knight; even squiring for Renly when they went out to tourneys served his purpose well, since he watched the men as they fought, observing styles and noting weaknesses that he'd use against them someday soon. Gregor Clegane was easy to anger and that could be used even if he stood just as tall as a castle; Barristan the Bold favoured his right because of some old injury he'd had in battle. He tucked away all the facts for later, and maybe spared a few for Renly when he rode. 

He drank with his lord in his pavilion by the field at Harrenhal. The king was come for the tourney but the brothers barely spoke; Robert had excused him and after the feast they'd come back out there to the field, where Loras built up the fire while Renly unstopped the wine. It was a dangerous game when he agreed that he'd join him, though he supposed they were friends by then. Renly had never treated him poorly, in fact never treated him as much less than his equal in the majority of matters. Loras helped him off with his rather stiff leather jerkin more because he chose to than from duty, and they took up seats by the fire with their cups of wine. Renly's armour needed buffing, his longsword sharpening, but he'd told him that could wait till morning or maybe after that. They'd be leaving for Storm's End soon enough, now the tourney was over. 

They talked and they drank and they reminisced; close on two years had passed by then since Loras had come to Storm's End. He was almost a man grown by then and the best fighter that he'd faced, Renly said, including his precious Kingslayer. It seemed that Loras had always idolised the man, at least in combat if not in honour; Loras thought if not for Queen Cersei, they would have had his head for the Mad King's death. 

Loras would joust in the very next tourney, Renly promised him. Before long, his brother would raise him to a knighthood and he'd ride the Roseroad back to his home in the Reach. 

In that moment, he hadn't known a single word of what to say. It was all he'd ever wanted, yes, the life he'd dreamed about since childhood, but suddenly he'd known just what that knighthood stripped him of. When Renly shifted by the fire, he moved to meet him without thinking. Their lips had met and then parted again before he'd even known he'd meant to move; he'd meant to thank him, and kissed him then instead. And then, he'd fled the tent.

Storm's End felt like home when they returned from Harrenhal. Loras put away Lord Renly's armour, the green enamelled steel that matched his eyes, gold antlers on his helm; it was easy to see why they thought him so much like his brother, the stag in King's Landing. Robert got older and fatter with each passing year but Renly was the image of him in his youth, with perhaps a touch more style about him as they saw through the castle he held, the fine clothes he wore when his brother favoured things he'd worn before the crown. And Robert had never won friends the way that Renly did, with his smiles and the ease of his manner. A king should have that quality, he thought. Loras would miss him when the time came. 

The servants drew the bath, and Loras attended just as always. The others were out at the whorehouse again, wasting their coin as they were so very apt to, while Loras swung his blunted sword without enthusiasm. Storm's End past the tourney had been large enough to hide in, or at least to hide from Renly. There'd been archery practice while Renly heard so many tedious, lengthy audiences, riding in the woods while Renly met with his castellan. He'd taken any duties anyone could conjure to assign him, just to take him out from meals so Renly couldn't chase the meaning of that evening's accident at Harrenhal. He ate in the kitchen with the cook and two serving girls, who gave him shy little smiles that made him wish he could so much as feign some interest. He wasn't made for loving women, it seemed to him. What he wanted, most truly, was Renly Baratheon. And in the end, as always, he'd had nowhere left to hide. 

"You think I don't know," Renly said as he sat there, soaking in the tub. He watched him over the flames of the candles and over the rim of his cup as he drank. Loras glanced at him, his sword not slowing though he'd had not a moment's concentration since he'd entered there that evening. "I'm not blind, Loras, and I'm not a fool. Stop treating me as if I were."

Loras frowned, though the whirl of his long hair about his face most likely masked it. "I don't know what you mean, my lord," he told him, the styling of his brief address making Renly frown at him from the bathtub. Outside those walls things were different, but he'd not called him lord for a year or more within them. He was aware it was a lie and the lying shamed him almost as much as what those lies had hid beneath them. 

"It's hard to believe that no one's ever noticed." Renly continued between sips of wine, then set the cup aside. He ran his wet fingers through his long black hair, drops of water clinging to his jaw, lingering at his throat where Loras knew he longed to set his lips and suck. "The women here adore you, Loras, as if you don't know it thoroughly. You're young and bright and handsome and crowning that, you're rich as a Lannister. But while all the other squires and pages run around like fools, whoring and wenching as if Robert had made a law of it, you're practicing with a sword like the gods never gave men maidens." He paused, watching Loras as he moved, emerald eyes following his lines in every shape he made. "Or you're here, with me. You know I've never held you to that. This was your choice." He frowned. "Stop that. Please. Put the bloody sword down just for once."

So Loras just let go of it. The sword fell to the stone floor of Renly's chamber with a flat metallic clank of dulled steel edges and the shoddily balanced pommel, and he stood there still as a shadow beside it, looking at him.

"I didn't tell you to drop it." 

Loras shrugged, perhaps just a fraction petulant with it. "Are you going to send me away?"

"Why would I do that?"

"You know why, Renly."

Renly chuckled. "Because you kissed me, Loras?"

"What else?"

Renly paused for a moment, a long one as he sat there in the water that came right up to his chest. Then he stood, quickly, and stepped from the tub without waiting for the cloth to dry himself. He left wet footprints over the room's stone floor and the rug by the bed before he could start to pat himself down. Loras had not a clue what to make of that so he stood where he was, watching him because there was nothing else for him to do. 

"I'm not sending you away," Renly said, at last. "But get out now before I do something I'll regret. I'll talk to you tomorrow."

Loras kicked away the sword toward the bed and stalked over to the door. He meant to go, he honestly did, he promised himself afterwards that he'd meant it, but he didn't go. He lowered the bar on the door and shut them both inside. He turned back. 

"So do it," he said. His voice was low and almost dark, hot like the flickering candles. He almost didn't recognise himself. 

Renly raised his brows at him as he reached for the clothing on his bed, the things that Loras had laid out for him just like he always did. He did everything for him, perhaps not just because of duty. Renly had never asked for anything; Loras wished he would. 

"I told you to leave."

"I'm saying no."

Loras moved closer. He slapped the shirt from Renly's hand and met his gaze, angry though he knew not why. Perhaps dismissal disagreed with him. 

"I thought refusal was a lord's prerogative," Renly told him, mocked him, but the calm he was projecting masked something else beneath. Loras knew him so he knew that he was nervous, found in that instant he knew everything about him because he'd watched and watched for years. Renly had spoken words to him that no one else would hear, and so he knew him so very much more deeply than any other ever had or could. But there were truths that still remained unspoken, and those were the truths that Loras would have. 

"It cuts both ways, you know," he said, stepping closer still. "The women vie for your attention but you smile as if you barely see them." A moment and he lay one hand on Renly's shoulder, ran it back to the nape of his neck over his hot, damp skin. He twisted his fingers in Renly's hair to hold him there, and Renly simply let him do it. He met his gaze, and held it. "You're always here. With me." He gave his hair a swift, sharp tug. "What does that mean, Renly?" Another tug pulled him closer. "What does that mean?"

He should have seen it coming, he thinks. He should have flinched away, perhaps, but he did nothing of the sort and Renly's palm flashed across his cheek. Loras found himself laughing as his face burned with the sting of it and Renly just looked so surprised, even more so when Loras turned back and kissed him. He pulled him close, his hands on hot bare skin, leaned up and pressed his lips to his with urgency he'd not possessed before. As Renly relented, as taut muscle flowed smooth beneath his palms and Renly's fingers tangled in his hair, he knew what he'd been made for. It wasn't a knighthood, armour, honour or a keep. It wasn't battle or the lists, where he'd always dreamed that he'd find belonging. It was the warmth of Renly's palm at the small of his back, the thrill of his mouth sweet with wine. It was this, and Renly felt the same. 

It was raining in the morning after, a storm settling into the bay and the Narrow Sea beyond it just like the day that Loras first came to the castle. Thunder rumbled over the horizon and somehow Loras felt at peace despite it; he'd slept the night bare in Renly's bed, tangled with him as that was more joy than either man ever known. They fit together. Every act of trial and error there beneath the sheets was a moment that he'd always keep with him because he'd never known a love like that. This would be the first time of many.

Loras slipped from the bed in the pale morning light and went to the window where Renly stood. The rain came in through the parted panes and dusted the long lines of their bare bodies as they stood there; Loras wound his arms about Renly's waist and stepped closer still till his chest pressed up to Renly's back, some warmth between them in the storm. 

"My lord," Loras murmured, his lips a smile against the strong pulse there in Renly's neck. Renly turned in his arms to see him, like he'd praise the old gods and the new for every instant that this lasted them. It was the first sweet breath of air after the water in his lungs, Loras thought. It was living. It was everything he'd never known he'd wanted, it was the answer to so many questions he'd never known to ask. He'd wanted it to last a lifetime. 

Renly's death was everything that Loras feared. 

There was never meant to be so much blood. It was everywhere, soaking through the rugs into the grass and the earth below them, soaking through Renly's fine clothes to stain his skin a sickly red, clotting on his armour. Renly was no longer himself once his life's blood escaped and Loras came to him too late to say goodbye. 

He was meant to die with him, abed and asleep; Renly was meant to die King of the Seven Kingdoms, old but still smiling easy smiles, in the Red Keep up on Aegon's Hill where he'd have sat the Iron Throne for years. The smallfolk would have loved him just because it was so easy to. But he died awaiting battle instead, about to kill his brother, and his murderers remained unknown. 

Loras remembers washing away the blood. It clung to Renly's cold, dead skin but he cleaned away every drop as he fought hard to not remember. The servants drew the water for Renly's bath and Loras had attended him; Renly's laughter was so very bright as Loras undressed and joined him in the big full copper tub. He'd sat astride Renly's thighs as they kissed, skin on skin in the warmth of the water. They lay together after; Loras straddled Renly's hips and rode him, palms pressed to his chest as Renly's hands found the length of his manhood. They'd had seven months to perfect those things before he was made Ser Loras. And even then fate had favoured them: Renly was called to sit at his brother's small council, and Loras came to court soon after. They'd been the worst kept secret in all of King's Landing, though they'd never truly cared. Secrecy had ceased to hold much meaning.

Loras washed the blood away and closed the gash at Renly's throat, a line of tiny stitches when his hands stopped their shaking just long enough to sew. There were no tears that came but Loras was drowned then as he's drowning still. Dying would be nothing at all, he thinks; the drowning is the worst of it. 

So he'll serve King Tommen, and his sister Margaery the Queen, a knight of the Kingsguard and thus sworn to them for life. He loves his sister, loves his brothers, says he loves his king, but it's sentiment he hardly feels these days because beneath the surface of the water everything is cold and blurred. 

He'll give his life for his king one day, he thinks and he believes it. He wonders if it matters how that king will always be Renly.


End file.
